Twitter Vs Bots: Platform Apparently Suspended 70M Fake Accounts Back In May And June

It appears Twitter is on its way to better protecting its users from bots and other spammy accounts after reports have seen the social media platform actually ban fake users and suspend other fake accounts everyday. In fact, it’s banned as much as 70-million fake accounts back in May and June alone, approximating that the social media platform has been banning 1-million (!) Twitter accounts everyday.

It appears Twitter is on a rampage as the social media platform appears to have amped up its game against fake users. If reports are to be believed, then it’s just suspended 70-million accounts in May and June alone, all for the effort of ensuring the impact of misinformation in the platform is reduced. Its activity in two (2) months was double the rate of deleted or suspended accounts back in October 2017.

Twitter’s more aggressive purges appears to have alarmed a lot of users, however. While Twitter did assure users that it’s wiping out fake accounts and bots, some users are wondering if Twitter was also silencing conversative users. Interestingly, Twitter has also started to take the opportunity to liquidate accounts that spam retweets in order to promote the existence of more genuine interaction between users.

While Twitter’s primary objective is to control misinformation, this move is quite new to Twitter to have a much heavier-handed platform policy – especially for Twitter that’s avoided the act of suspending users for abuse. Not anymore, it seems.

Interestingly, removing just over 70-million users might appear to be a blow to a company that’s struggling to improve upon its number of users. However, Twitter said the mass removal of accounts didn’t have a significant impact on the number of daily active users of the platform. In fact, these active users still take the time to tweet regularly.

However, some do report that Twitter did have internal debates as to whether or not the decision to be targeting fake accounts is a sound move for the platform. It appears it’s the news happening around Congress and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and the political pressure of the matter that’s been pushing Twitter on the defensive – especially when Congress did put an inquiry on Twitter regarding the amount of Russian fake accounts in the platform.

It appears since then, Twitter has figured out account behavior in order to identify these people – including things like tweeting to various unfamiliar accounts, and how many of these accounts block these suspicious users. Interestingly, Twitter has also “leveled up” into curbing the impact of these accounts, having buried their tweets deep into the system.